The act sets out four general categories of services. The first is that the Office of the Parliamentary Budget Officer must produce macroeconomic documents, analyses and reports.
The second is that we must respond to any request made by any of the four committees mentioned in the act, and they are the House of Commons Standing Committee on Finance, the House of Commons Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates, the House of Commons Standing Committee on Public Accounts, and the Standing Senate Committee on Finance. Those four committees may under the act request macroeconomic analyses, analysis of economic trends, and so on.
All other parliamentary committees of the Senate and House of Commons may request cost analyses. For example, what will it cost to implement Bill x if it is passed into law? I can give you another very concrete example. Two years ago, the House of Commons Standing Committee on Health asked us to do a costing analysis for a national pharmacare program that does not exist in Canada. The members of the committee adopted a motion. The committee's motion became the order of reference of the PBO, so to speak, for that cost analysis. We worked with the Standing Committee on Health and we were able to draft a report, nine months later, which the committee then used to prepare its own report.
In the final analysis, all parliamentarians may submit requests to us, not about ideas, but having to do with the financial cost of parliamentary measures that already exist and are debated in Parliament.